The Tongue of the Mushroom is a celebration of breaking down through the lens of poetry, including poems, inquiries into craft, writing and process prompts. The Tongue of the Mushroom Zine is designed to explore mushrooms, grief, body loss, death ways (obits, elegies, abortions, funerals), and the art of breaking down.

So get out your mushrooms and your writing knives…

The French phrase la petit mort (the little death) is used to describe the waning sensation of orgasm as a prefiguring to death. The process of writing poetry can feel like deathly orgasms, both deeply uncomfortable and the only thing that matters. It heightens our consciousness through shifting perspectives. It is a place to lose ourselves and find ourselves.

Writing and orgasm are not the only ways that we can reach into the liminal. Giving birth, tending death, meditation, skateboarding, tracking, gardening, painting, and other moments of deep focus may open portals. Towards this end, humans consume mushrooms and plant medicines, and today social media is saturated with countless benefits of mushrooms hinging on consumption. Human needs aside, mushrooms are the link between what is living and what is dead, sky and soil, flesh and nutrients. Mushrooms move things from one realm to another. Let us be like mushrooms and as we write, let that be the medicine.

After the poem is written, poets have additional opportunities to access the liminal through revision. We get to grapple with demise, decay, and resurrection. You can cut, strike, make choices, and gesture on and off the page. You can speak with the forked tongue of form. Like mushrooms, we can release the self-referential mind and move perspectives across temporal and spatial fields. It can feel both deeply uncomfortable (even painful) while also joyous to read such poems. This poem killed me.

You may not be a reviser. That’s ok. Some people do all their dying before the line even hits the page. But, what if, by allowing ourselves to play with revision, we expand our capacity for new lines, thoughts, and poems? The Tongue of the Mushroom is an invitation to deepen your connections to poetry portals, the art of breaking down and liminal spaces, while digging out what is not serving the poem.

Let’s make space for new ways of being with language and our capacity for discomfort and pleasure.